The Thread Where We Are Board Game Geeks

Or maybe I'm just bitter because that's what happened the last time I played, ha ha. For the most part, it is very well balanced, and you can catch up if you play well. As with any of these games, though, luck plays a part.

I own Kingdom Builder! It happens to be designed by Donald X. Vaccarino, the creator of Dominion. I like it a lot. It does definitely have the potential for someone to get a serious advantage in the first couple of turns, but that can be related to everyone being inexperienced. After a couple plays it becomes more clear what the relative strengths of the special powers are and how important it is to claim them and use them as quickly as possible.

Yeah, last time we were playing with the expansion, which adds a couple really crazy new powers (like one that allows you to place "rocks" on the board back in block off your settlements, which is super useful but whose utility I didn't realize until it was too late) and a new mechanic with one time use powers. Still, the guy in the lead lucked out with his first couple territory cards and so he was able to get a bunch of special powers, while another guy kept getting caught in one little corner and wasn't able to get any of the powers.

7 wonders is legitimate

card game chrononauts is a lot of fun

got arkham horror!

now need people to play with :-(

We have Arkham Horror,the Dunwich Horror expansion, and Mansions of Madness. All are good but they've been largely neglected this past year because the games go for so long.

I'm at a place where I just want a game to end after 30 minutes or so.

Gauntlet of Fools is a fun little game by Donald X. that is also very fast, once you know how to play you can probably play twice in 30 minutes.

Have I talked in this thread about how I can't stand playing Arkham Horror? It might just be the group that I've played it with, but man I find it just overwhelmingly boring.

i have a responsibility-free day so i'm playing by myself with three characters, i've played six or seven full turns so far over the course of two hours. right now my positions is nailbitingly tense - a shoggoth in the outskirts, two monsters on each gate, including a starspawn. there's also a wandering dhole in there. on the other hand, everyone has blessings and harvey walters has a magic lamp that's like +5 to combat. basically i have everyone in position to close the three open gates and everyone is buffed so i'm either about to be in position to close all the open gates at once - though a new one will definitely spawn - or i'm about to get my ass handed to me. this is alternately boring and awesome.

the dhole ate ashcan pete's dog though which kind of sucks because he's short in the sanity dept anyway

i would take the researcher and pete to church first but that would be two more gates to make six total by the time mandy and pete can get to any open gates.

finished! only took four hours.

I played a By Forum game on BGG the other week and it actually works pretty well.

(Short version - we were playing vs Abthoth, looked like a lost cause as the Doom Track had shot up really quickly. Then for two turns gates started opening on players and they got spat out early which means we sealed something like 3 in two turns and then had another stroke of luck as two turns on the trot the new gate opened on the location of the existing, keeping the doom track stalled. Then one player through, Find Gate, Elder Sign, done.

My highlight was not once, but twice, sneaking through a pack of three monsters which included a ghost both times. They're -2 and we had -1 environment as well.)

recent faves:
Kingdom Builder
Summoner Wars
Lost Cities
Descent

Good:
Yggdrasil
Goa
Android Netrunner

Not so good:
Phoenicia
Memory of 44

I have been exploiting the warehouse finds uncovered by BoardGameGuru and have lots to look forward to in the new year like Singapore, The Road To Canterbury, Upon The Salty Ocean and London.

This Sunday...MAGE KNIGHT. My friend just bought it and we're both looking over the walkthrough/rules right now.

also, yeah Kingdom Builder is great! Only had a chance to play once but would play again.

Sean by Memory of 44 do you mean Memoir '44? If so, that games is pretty awesome, I thought, although I played the online version.

Yeah, Memoir of 44. I bet it would be more fun on a computer.

Yeah, I observed the real life version once and it seemed like a ton of work to actually make it work. If you're still curious, you should check out the online version. It's pay to play (you purchase tokens), but they give you a bunch of free tokens to get you hooked at first, and if you're like me, you'll get enough enjoyment out of those 15 or so games that you'll never want to play again anyway.

Two "adventurers breaking into the pyramid" themed games I played over the holidays:

The Adventurers: The Pyramid of Horus is pretty sweet - you have reasonable incentives both to linger and hope for a bigger haul of treasure, or to hurry back out since each round another cube of stone "falls" from the ceiling, potentially sealing you in forever. Also a nice mechanic where damage, inventory slots, and how much you can do per turn are all linked together so you don't have to keep track of them separately. Makes it really clear that, okay, it might be worth it to open this treasure chest, but it'll slow me down next turn when I need to dodge out of the way of the mummy. Pretty cool. Only thing that sucked was the cards were badly shuffled so on my first turn I ended up getting a whole spree of injuries and was sort of hobbled for the rest of the game. But cool.

Escape: The Curse of the Temple is a somewhat gimmicky high-speed cooperative game where everybody is trying to escape the temple by making the correct dice rolls, while a CD soundtrack raises the tension and bangs gongs when it's too late. Cute enough, though kind of just a bunch of chaos going on. Would be pretty sweet for a twelve-year-old's birthday party if everybody's patient enough to get the mechanics of it down (and not cheat).

My group's latest obsession is Galaxy Trucker, where you first race to assemble a space rig, grabbing parts from the center before your opponents can get them, and then watch your ship slowly get destroyed by asteroids and pirates. There's a good amount of luck but this is one of the few games I can think of where losing might be more fun than winning.

Kingdom Builder was really interesting the couple times I played, and my friend picked it up for Xmas, so we should be playing that one some more soon.

That Pyramid of Horus game looks pretty good, and I was vaguely looking at Galaxy Trucker in the shop about an hour ago, but I'm currently on a self-imposed ban after having picked up a pile of clearance deals at boardgameguru over Christmas. When I say a pile I mean a pile too - Road To Canterbury, Shipyard, London, Tinners Trail, Upon The Salty Ocean, Pergamon, Heavens of Olympus, Industry, Singapore, Power Grid Factory Manager and Forgotten Planet for CHEAP.

Galaxy Trucker and Space Alert (both by same guy) are both really fun, i love the format they use of timed/fast-paced setup followed by helplessly watching everything go to shit when you play it out

This place opened near me recently called the Edinburgh Game Hub. Basically some guy bought a cafe with a huge 'basement' area that he transformed into rooms for wargaming and board gaming. They have over 200 board games apparently. Spent some time there last week and played Zombicide (which is pretty good, albeit all-too-often vague about specifics of rules), tried out 7 Wonders (I have no idea what is going in this game) and some quick Japanese (though possibly just "Japanese" rather than authentic) tile game. I expect I'll be more of a board game geek as time goes on.

"Tsuro" is that Japanese one, apparently

tsuro is a fun simple game

7 Wonders is good but it's more for the min-maxing resource game types (which is me sometimes admittedly), i never figured out all the proper strategy so i just go for all the blue cards every game

played pandemic for the first time this weekend. rented from a board game shop, played about five times the first night and three times last night. super-fun, nail-bitingly tense, though extremely difficult to win in our experience (we only won once out of about ten games). perhaps we're doing something incorrectly. really liked how it had the feel of watching disease outbreaks spread across the world.

also played cosmic encounter for the first time. it was fun but i think it lacked some sci-fi flavor. a lot of the game felt very generic - spaceships might as well have been poker chips and different attacks might as well have been uno cards. still, i liked the negotiation element a lot (even though nobody i was playing with ever really wanted to negotiate) and i liked the open-endedness and simplicity of the game.

I've played Cosmic a few times and I keep thinking that there's a pretty rad game there but I haven't found it yet. Game always seems to end before anything particularly tricksy can happen with the special powers and flares.

How many people are you playing Cosmic with? It's pretty weak with 3 or 4.

It's really at its best with 5 - you REALLY want time for people's crazy abilities to come out, people to fuck over eachother with flares etc. Make sure you remember that flares stay in your hand after use!

It's a silly and crazy imbalanced game but can be very fun.

legacy is ridic good, though it eventually gets pretty SPOILERS

played more of the resistance last week; that game is heaps of fun though I think I suck at it

The bewildering magic of the boardgamegeek MATH TRADE.

Giving (to someones) my copies of DIGGING, 1960: THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT, and, er, an Oliver Stone DVD set.

Receiving (from someones) ARKHAM HORROR, SETTLERS OF CATAN, and PIT. Hurray!

So my wife and I are seriously considering buying a gaming table from these guys:

http://geekchichq.com/

They have lots of very nice stuff, although none of it is particularly affordable.

I preordered a Geek Chic table (the "Portal"). I figure it'll be my one piece of very expensive furniture. Literally everything else is from Ikea.

Has anyone on here played Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer? I'm thinking of trying this out. Looks like a cross between Dominion and Magic: The Gathering.

It's way more Dominion than M:TG. Think of a game of Dominion where you can potentially buy any card from any of the expansions but only six random cards are available each turn. I don't like it as much, but I do find it fun to play once in a while. There's a little more player interaction which is nice. I guess the flavor is close to M:TG.

aubrey plaz is a bgg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jWK45NJNTM&feature=youtu.be&t=5m45s

at 5m45
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jWK45NJNTM

Ha, lucky for her not to have played Risk. BSG is my favorite! But I'll probably never play it again bc I don't know anyone anymore. Have the ppl from upthread been liking Mage Knight? I was thinking of getting it, mostly to have something to play solo.

I don't even play that many board games, but man, I want one of those tables.

Totally! Also I don't have any comics but I wanted one of the card-catalogue-drawer-style storage units for comics and game trinkets.

(and then a time machine to go back to the 90s and order even more fanzines and not lose the ones I did order, so I can put the A5 ones in the comic drawers, if they even fit)

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-board-games-that-ruined-it-everyone/

I usually hate Cracked, but that's a pretty great article. All those games are so mind numbing and yet so well love, it's a travesty. My son has been coercing me to play Battleship a lot lately and I'm ready to end it all. Luckily, he's also been trying to get me to play more Ticket To Ride - Europe, so I suppose there is light at the end of the tunnel.

that's a fun article. it's made me want to look for board games to play on my iphone. i have settlers of catan and ticket to ride as actual board games (though sadly not where i live) so not those, i'd like to try a new game. looking around i saw that puerto rico was on sale (2.99 instead of 7.99 or something like that) but it's ipad only. anyways, any particular recs?

Well there's a bunch of Reiner Knizia's games with iOS versions. I just got Tigris and Euphrates for my iphone, it's great.

Has anyone ever played this particular strategy/war game? http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/62227/labyrinth-the-war-on-terror-2001

Andean Abyss looks soooooo good but may be too complicated game-wise for a beginner.

there's a 4700 post discussion of it here: http://talk.consimworld.com/WebX/.1dd44a7e/0

The designer chimes in on the first page. But, no I haven't played it. It can be played solitaire which i find interesting.

not sure i want that much detail before i try it myself! just wondered if anyone here had played it.
the solitaire option does seem pretty neat as an intellectual exercise.

my 2 brothers, a close friend and i used to play risk all throughout our childhood - so we just picked up risk legacy and plan to play this weekend. reviews are great, so i'm pretty excited

tell me about it when you do im intrigued